When an experienced coach like Jeff Fisher directly questions his opponent's play calling, you can be certain that it's not just a slip of the tongue.

After Sunday's victory, the Rams' head coach was asked about the 49ers' errant option play.

"I don't know what they were trying to accomplish there," Fisher said. "But we took advantage of one of their mistakes."

Fisher also noted his delight that the 49ers gifted him 94 seconds to try to tie the score by stopping the clock twice, with an incomplete pass and an out-of-bounds run by Colin Kaepernick, allowing Fisher to preserve a timeout.

"So that certainly helped our cause," he said, twisting the knife.

These observations are not mandatory postgame speak. And they fit into the underlying subplot of Jim Harbaugh's NFL coaching career: He's the coach whom other coaches enjoy humbling.

Granted, they haven't had many chances. The loss to the Rams was only the seventh of Harbaugh's two-year NFL coaching career. But one definitely gets a sense that the rest of the league is happy to take the 49ers' brash coach down a peg or two.

There's the Jim Schwartz handshaking incident and the longstanding antipathy with Pete Carroll. There's Harbaugh's trail of enemies whom he made as a player that lingers. There's his "we bow to no man" stance. There's his happy flouting of league protocol.

And his, um, guts. Harbaugh's benching of Alex Smith is unprecedented. Even Bill Belichick, who faces Harbaugh in less than two weeks, never did this. In 2001, Belichick lost Drew Bledsoe (5-11 the season before) in the second game to injury. Bledsoe wasn't cleared for two months, and by then Tom Brady was firmly in control.